When private equity funds try to get around bank-ownership rules

The NYT sent Eric Lipton all the way to Cainsville, in the middle of absolutely nowhere, to visit what used to be called the First National Bank of Cainesville and is now called Flowers Bank, after its brand-new owner, Chris Flowers. Lipton has filed a great story of attempted regulatory arbitrage, where Flowers is personally buying this bank just so that he can get its national banking charter — his private equity shop being considered by the Fed to be not boring enough to own a bank.

The Fed is right, as Lipton shows — he even quotes Flowers talking about how “lowlife grave dancers like me will make a fortune” from the bank crisis and bailout. Which is not really the attitude that one wants bank owners to have: they should be boring and conservative, not greedy Masters of the Universe who happily drop $53 million on buying an Upper East Side townhouse.

Incidentally, the NYT’s picture caption is very wrong: it says that the value of the Cainsville bank is “about a third” of the value of Flowers’s townhouse. Not even close. As of the end of last year, the bank had $16.699 million in assets and $12.492 million in liabilities, for a book value of $4.2 million. Even if Flowers paid 2x book (unlikely, but possible, given that what he really wanted was the banking license rather than the bank) he will only have shelled out about $8 million for the bank, or about 15% of what he paid for his townhouse. More likely he paid less than a tenth of what he spent on his home.

If Lipton wants to follow up on the subject of regulatory arbitrage among private-equity shops which own banks, he might want to take a look at MatlinPatterson, a distressed debt fund right here in New York which has been going through all manner of contortions to avoid breaching rules preventing it from owning more than 24.9% of banks such as Flagstar Bancorp in Michigan. When it wanted to buy Flagstar, it couldn’t do so directly. So it asked its limited partners to send more money to a new entity it set up for the purpose, and as soon as it got that money, it refunded an identical amount back to those partners in a deal which looked very fishy to John Hempton back in April. (One of the limited partners was Nicola Horlick’s Bramdean Alternatives.)

I think it’s about time that we move from a rules-based system where private-equity types spend vast amounts of time and effort trying to get around rules preventing them from buying banks, and move to a principles-based approach where anybody attempting something as blatant as this (“it’s not my private-equity shop buying this bank, it’s me personally, so that’s fine”) gets slapped down sharpish. And that goes for MatlinPatterson, too.